The two organizations “called for hatred, violence and discrimination.”
France’s interior minister on Wednesday announced the dissolution of two pro-Palestinian advocacy organizations, accusing them of inciting violence and hatred.
Gerald Darmanin confirmed on Twitter that both the “Collectif Palestine Vaincra” (“Palestine Will Overcome Collective”) and the Palestine Action Committee were “dissolved this morning in the Council of Ministers, in accordance with the instructions of the President of the Republic.”
Darmanin said: “As detailed in the executive order I presented, it called for hatred, violence and discrimination.”
Both groups are militantly anti-Zionist, advocating the destruction of Israel as a democratic Jewish state and its replacement by a unitary state of Palestine.
A statement on the Palestine Collective’s website declared that the group “fights the State of Israel as a colonial and racist entity, an outpost of Western imperialism in the region. We denounce and fight France’s support for the Zionist entity.”
It also pledged to support the Palestinian “resistance … in all forms it deems necessary and legitimate, including armed struggle.” The group strongly supports the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an extreme left-wing terrorist organization.
The Palestine Action Committee, meanwhile, stated that it did not object to Darmanin’s condemnation of the group as “anti-Zionist.”
“We are anti-Zionists and want the liberation of Palestine,” the group declared in a statement on Wednesday responding to Darmanin’s announcement. “Palestine is a land stolen from the Palestinians and it must be returned to the Palestinians. Since 1948, the Zionists have wanted to annex more land by expelling, imprisoning, massacring the Palestinians.”
Darmanin’s decision came two weeks after he said he was examining the possibility of dissolving both groups. The interior minister has also launched an offensive against Islamist groups in France during the last year, closing down several mosques around the country that were alleged to have been radicalized.
Addressing the annual dinner last month of the French Jewish umbrella organization Crif, French Prime Minister Jean Castex denounced the analogy drawn by anti-Zionists between the State of Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa. He called for a “general mobilization” of French society against the “filthy monster” of antisemitism.